The circuits' components and sensors are vulnerable to aging, usage, environmental and physical issues, various unforeseen factors, either within laboratory controlled setups or field application scenarios, representing a growing concern for data reliability. This is a particular issue in safety critical applications of, namely, medical and automotive electronic systems.
Such data reliability issues have been addressed through a number of ad hoc strategies or a mixture of standards mostly directed to digital scenarios; however, multi-sensors scenarios seldom benefit from such approaches.
CN102866967 discloses an I2C (inter-integrated circuit) equipment management method. According to said document, multiple I2C equipment on one host machine equipment can be effectively managed. However, this solution targets the issue of limited I2C bus addresses, in particular within scenarios where a number of devices of the same type need to be accessed individually while sharing same I2C address (or a limited subset). Thus, the before mentioned solution is limited to accessibility management issues and does not allow intra and inter module synchronization, and/or has an associated extended I2C instruction set.
Document US 2012/066423 A1 describes a solution to facilitate expansion of a single I2C bus to multiple devices. This solution presents several problems, such as the centralization of the device accessibilities through a common expander module. Although such approach allows for multi-casting and broadcasting capabilities to devices with a common address, the methodological approach creates a bottleneck through the described expander module. Such limitation does not allow for distributed scalability and for physically grouping devices to a specific expander module. Furthermore, the solution presented does not allow for intra and inter module synchronization, since targets only communication accessibility flexibility.
In general, prior art solutions do not allow flexible, configurable and expandable granular addressability through a de-centralized approach. Moreover, the associated set of mechanisms and instructions hereby described, introduce intra- and inter-module synchronization and/or management, extendable to mixed-signal circuits, sensors, and all device type and extension while I2C complaint.